


nobody, not even the rain, has such small hands.

by bringyouhometoo



Category: Doctor Who, Doctor Who (2005)
Genre: Angst, Canon Compliant, F/M, Fluff and Angst, Inspired by Poetry
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2013-07-16
Updated: 2013-07-16
Packaged: 2017-12-20 08:40:36
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 2,728
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/885256
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/bringyouhometoo/pseuds/bringyouhometoo
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>“What would you like me to read to you?”<br/>Amy shrugs. “Something…pretty,” she decides. “Words that – sound beautiful.”<br/>Amelia Pond, he thinks.</p>
            </blockquote>





	nobody, not even the rain, has such small hands.

**Author's Note:**

> Thanks to Spark and Christine for beta services! Written while in the middle of my first watch of The Hour, and if you're familiar with the show then there will be familiar themes and sources of inspiration (no actual spoilers for The Hour, though). I cry about ships that are parallel to other ships. A lot.

 

I. 

“Read to me.”

He looks up from his book, slowly at first – starting at her feet, her toenails vivid tangerine against the pools of dripping water – and then all at once, snapping his eyes up to meet hers. Amy smirks, and languidly picks up a towel from her chair. His throat runs dry as he watches her dry off, watches as the strands of damp red fire escape and cling to her cheeks, her neck, her shoulders, watches as rivulets and droplets run down her skin and pool around the edges of her...well, _technically_ the Doctor supposes it could be called a swimming costume, except he’s not sure it deserves that term, he thinks a swimming costume ought to have a lot more _costume_ to it.

“I talked a bomb out of blowing up London today, now _read to me_ ,” Amy repeats, dropping her towel with a slight huff and squeezing in beside him. The Doctor feels himself go very still for a moment, and then forces himself to turn the page.

“I’m in the middle of a chapter, Pond.”

“Start over.”

“I’m reading this!”

“And I want you to read to me!” Her tone rises to match his, mocking his indignation – he attempts a stern glare and she giggles. “ _Please._ ”

The Doctor sighs, and puts his book away; Proust’s _Captive_ can wait and, somehow, he thinks it might not be quite to Amy’s taste. “What would you like me to read to you?”

Amy shrugs. “Something...pretty,” she decides. “Words that – sound beautiful.”

 _Amelia Pond,_ he thinks, and says, “That’s not very specific.”

She just rolls her eyes, swatting him on the knee; a damp handprint stains his trousers, the cold remnants of swimming pool already seeping through the tweed she’s been leaning on. “Something – poetic, then.”

“You mean poetry?”

“Shut up.”

“Oh, poetry’s easy,” he tells her, a grin already forming on his lips. “Poetry I can do! You don’t need a _book_ for me to read you _poems_ from, Amy, poems are meant to be _recited._ ”

“Recite to me, then,” Amy laughs, tucking her feet under her thighs and nestling her head into the space between his shoulder and his neck. “A poem, any poem, your choice – just make it a really _nice-sounding_ one.”

He turns his head slightly and looks at her – her pink cheeks flush and warm, her ivory skin pale and shiny with infinite, miniscule drops of water reflecting the light and giving her a pale, almost _glowing_ palette, her eyes shining and her lashes heavy with affection and exhaustion, her lips half-parted and bright, bright red; looks at her hair, and thinks how it isn’t even _ginger_ when it’s wet, it’s just _red –_ red like burnt copper, like shining rubies, like chestnuts warm from the summer sun, like scarlet ribbons on birthday cakes, like... _red –_ and the choice is easy. Something beautiful. Right.

“ _Somewhere I have never travelled, gladly beyond any experience, your eyes have their silence_ ,” he begins, training his gaze on his fingers resting against his knees and feeling the air settling around the two of them. “ _In your most frail gesture are things which enclose me, or which I cannot touch because they are too near_.”

The water dripping from Amy’s hair raises goose bumps on his skin, and he has to clear his throat before continuing. “ _Your slightest look easily will unclose me though I have closed myself as fingers_ ,” he says, brow furrowing; she shifts against his side, and it’s difficult to stay focused on his hands, on the pattern of clenched knuckles and white fingernails. “ _You open always petal by petal myself as spring opens -- touching skillfully, mysteriously -- her first rose_.”

Amy sighs, the first sound she’s made since he started talking; he starts slightly, looks down at her, but she’s smiling. “Carry on,” she whispers, eyes half-closed; he nods, and allows himself to rest his head against her still-wet hair.

“ _Or if your wish be to close me_ ,” he continues. “ _I and my life will shut very beautifully, suddenly, as when the heart of this flower imagines the snow carefully everywhere descending._ ”

The air in the room has grown very warm around them; everything is poised, and fragile, and waiting. The whole universe holds its breath.

“ _Nothing which we are to perceive in this world equals the power of your intense fragility; whose texture compels me with the color of its countries_ ,” he half-whispers, suddenly afraid of breaking the silence. Amy’s breath is hot against his neck. “ _Rendering death and forever with each breathing._ ”

And all at once it’s too much. The pressure, the warmth, the _closeness_ – everything that was tender and strange and wonderful one minute is constricting and claustrophobic the next, making his throat constrict and his skin crawl.

“ _I do not know..._ ” his voice is raw, harsh against the silence. “ _I – I do not know what it is about you that closes and opens; only something in me understands_...”

Amy glances up when he doesn’t continue. “...Doctor?”

He looks at her; remembers to smile, half a second too late. “I forget the rest.”

She holds his gaze for a half-second too long, and then elbows him in the kidneys. “Idiot. I _told_ you to get a book.”

“That _hurt,_ Pond,” he shouts after her as she jumps up out of her seat, the noise a sudden relief when she flounces off and dives back into the pool; a spray of water grazes his face, shocking him back to reality.

 

***

Amy swims until the water starts to feel cold and heavy against her skin; until her hands and feet are wrinkled and soft; until her head is exhausted and empty of thought. Then she wraps herself in the biggest, warmest, fluffiest towel she can find, hits the Doctor on the back of the head ( _lightly_ ) and calls out a cheery “Night, then! Planet tomorrow, yeah? You promised me a _planet_ next.”  
Falling asleep takes her longer than she’d care to admit.

II. 

  
He doesn’t know what compels him to do it, weeks later. Maybe it’s in Amy’s eyes; maybe it’s in the way she keeps half-turning like she expects there to be another figure stood beside her; maybe it’s in the doubt that clouds every syllable when she talks about what happened with the Silurians, as if she can’t quite piece her memory around that cave and who she can’t remember losing there.

It’s late, and the hum of the console room sounds too loud in his ears; he’s restless, and awake long after she’s gone to bed, and he finds himself prowling through the library. Hunting for the book of poems that he _knows_ contains the one he needs.

He recovers it eventually – a slim paperback volume with a faded blue cover, he thinks Sarah left it here, or maybe it was Jo’s – and sits down at one of the long mahogany desks to write. The library is still and silent around him, the light from his reading lamp sending strange rippling shadows out across the dark water.

Finding the right paper, and choosing the right pen, takes some time; finally, he settles on a square of thick ivory card and a blue fountain pen that spills ink smoothly across the paper with every motion of his hand. He writes slowly, and deeply concentrated; it’s a marked difference from his usual scrawled hastiness, but he wants to finish without blemishes just this once. Somehow, starting over would cheat him of the chance to do it _right;_ it becomes a matter of pride.

When he’s finished, he sits and watches the water reflect lamplight back at him until the ink is dry.

_(i do not know what it is about you that closes_  
_and opens; only something in me understands_  
_the voice of your eyes is deeper than all roses) nobody,_  
_not even the rain, has such small hands_  
_\-- e e cummings_

III.

Amy finds the card nestled between two pages of a dog-eared copy of _Around the World in 80 Days_ that she’s been meaning to finish for months now. She thinks she might have started reading it before the wedding; long before, even. The card looks new-ish, though, and she thinks she’d remember it if it had been there the last time she picked up this book – it’s thick, and coloured an ivory cream that stands out against sun-worn paper that’s wrinkled and soft to the touch.

For a moment she just stares at the familiar hand-writing, at the shape of the syntax, the ink staining its way across the card; and then the words sink in, like an old photograph. That day in the library, her in the pool and him on the sofa; the strange temderness of his words sinking into her like ink in water; it’s so long ago now that she can’t even remember why he stopped reciting – only that the day was perfect, and happy, tinged sepia now with everything they were, before.  This card – this poem – is only a reminder, now, of a halcyon time long gone. Erased and forgotten and remembered again, but still gone.

 _Not_ that she’s unhappy. She isn’t.

Still. It’s hard not to miss that strange, short period of simple _joy_ of being together, of travelling and exploring and just...existing. Together. She waited so long, and he came _back_ for her, and they were together on the TARDIS, in the library, and the swimming pool was _in_ the library just like he’d told her when she was seven. Everything still felt possible, every future – every choice – every door was open to them, to her.

And now? Now – he’s dead.

Amy has watched him die, on a beach in Utah. The sun was setting, and a murderer in a spacesuit walked out of the lake to shoot him dead.

Her past, his future. And she _can’t tell him._

She clenches her fingers around the card until her knuckles turn white, and then carefully smooths out the card and slips it back between the pages of the old paperback _._ Then, silently and deliberately and without alerting Rory (he’s lost somewhere over in Medical History, she can hear his occasional exclamation as he finds another discovery from a far-off planet or the Earth’s distant future), Amy makes her way back to her bedroom and puts the book into her old red-and-white suitcase, the one she never unpacks, the one that stands ready and waiting in the corner of any room she finds herself staying the night in.

And there the book stays, and so does the card. Later, when he’s settled her and Rory into their house and she goes back to waiting for him, Amy will find herself reading that card over and over again, digging through that old suitcase in the quiet hours of the morning.

It’s not comfort that the poem brings, but it’s – something.

IV.

“—And, you know, they never really knew each other, she was already married and so all he did was write poetry about her, but _vast_ amounts of it, enough to fill a book – and he did, actually, fill a book, I mean,” the Doctor is mid-ramble, and Amy’s only half-listening; Rory’s making faces at her from the kitchen, and Brian’s in the pantry getting another bottle of wine. “ _Il Canzoniere._ The Song Book. Poems and letters and prose, all about this _one_ woman, this one girl he met and fell in love with and never forgot, don’t you think that’s incredible? And _what_ a mind that was, so much – beauty, and brilliance, so of course they weren’t just _love letters,_ they were the _greatest love letters ever written_...Really, just, wonderful. And he never got her, either. Never even tried. The poems weren’t about persuading her, or trying to convince her to leave her husband, he was just...writing, and expressing himself, and letting her know how loved she—“

“What are we talking about?” Rory’s come back through with a tray of brownies. Amy meets his eye and shrugs with a badly-hidden giggle; the Doctor looks indignant.

“Petrarch,” he tells her, reprovingly. _“Francesco Petrarca!_ Scholar, writer, poet, the father of humanism – and a great baker, by the way, don’t let the lumps fool you, his scones are _delicious_ – honestly, it’s like no one even pays attention to me anymore.”

“I was getting brownies,” Rory protests, holding up the tray in evidence. “Nice ones! No lumps!“

”I just said the _lumps are what made Petrarch’s scones so delicious—_ “

“All right, Doctor,” Amy tells him, interrupting what she suspects is another monologue. “We’re very sorry.”

“Well,” he harrumphs, looking vaguely mollified when she hands him a brownie. “I suppose that’s all right.”

“Anyway, I _was_ listening.”

“Really?”

“Love poetry! Letters! He wrote them for this – what was her name?”

“Laura.”

“Right, this Laura, who he met in church, he fell in love with her but she was married, so all he did was write poems and things, and then he put them into a book.”

“Very good,” the Doctor grins, pleased with her; Amy laughs, and helps herself to a brownie. “Wonderful man, you know. A fantastically _clever_ man, yes, but – heartfelt. Turned all that intelligence to composing some of the greatest declarations of love known to – well, _ever_.”

“Y’see?” Amy says, turning to Rory and feeding him a bite of brownie. “Love poems. How come you never wrote me a love letter, hhm?”

“Amy, we’re _already married._ ”

“So? Romance has to die because you get married, is that it?”

Rory rolls his eyes and tries to look affronted; but he finds her mock anger too genuinely funny, and his eyes dance. “I’m very sorry for this great oversight,” he tells her gravely. “If it’s any condolence, I think I tried to write a song about you in the back of my maths book when I was fourteen.”

“Some half-arsed lyrics written in school _don’t count,_ ” Amy tells him, grinning when he just leans over and steals another bite. “Love letters! I’ve never been written a _love letter_!”

“Yes you have,” the Doctor says, his tone too casual, his face free from expression, his eyes trained on his knife and fork.

The room grows very still.

“Rory, where should I put this? I got two bottles out, just in case—“ Brian pauses in the doorway, clearly unsettled by the three of them, no one looking at each other and each deeply invested in their own fingernails. “...Should I go get some glasses?”

“They’re up in a cupboard.” Rory is up and out of his chair before Amy can stop him. “I’ll show you.”

He closes the door to the kitchen with a carefully-measured slam.

Amy keeps staring at her placemat.

“ _I do not know what it is about you_.”

There’s a crumb of brownie stuck to one of the cubes they’ve been using as coasters; she picks it up and licks it off her finger, her eyes fixed on the table.

“ _That closes and opens; only something in me understands—“_

She looks up, then, daring the Doctor to continue; the door behind him has swung open, and for a heart-stopped moment Amy looks up and sees Rory watching them with an unreadable expression.

The Doctor’s eyes widen slightly; by the way his shoulders tighten and his tone lightens, Amy knows he’s aware of the intrusion. “I forget the rest.” 

V. 

Later – Amy’s in bed, and Rory’s gone to brush his teeth – the Doctor comes and leans in the doorway.“ _I do not know what it is about you that closes and opens; only something in me understands the voice of your eyes is deeper than all roses_ ,” he says, staring straight ahead and making no effort to disguise the emotions he’s usually so good at hiding behind a ready smile. “ _Nobody, not even the rain, has such small hands._ ”

Amy rolls over and closes her eyes. “E. E. Cummings.”

She doesn’t hear him leave, and by the time Rory comes back she’s not sure he was ever there in the first place.

VI.

The late summer sun beats down on their necks and shoulders, and if Amy squints she can make out the Manhattan skyline through the trees. The Doctor’s back is warm against hers, and she doesn’t have to look up from her newspaper to know that he’s smiling.

“Read to me.”


End file.
